1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing and drying method, a method of production of an electronic device, and a printing and drying system, more particularly relates to a printing and drying method and a printing and drying system enabling overlapping printing of complementary type patterns on a support sheet with little positional deviation when for example producing a multilayer ceramic capacitor or other electronic device.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, when producing a multilayer ceramic capacitor or other electronic device, as shown in FIG. 10, sometimes a support sheet constituted by the carrier sheet 20 is formed on its surface with a release layer 22 which in turn is formed over it with predetermined patterns of an electrode layer 12a by printing. Alternatively, sometimes a carrier sheet 20 is formed on its surface with a ceramic green sheet which in turn is formed on its surface with predetermined patterns of an electrode layer 12a by printing.
After this, sometimes the clearance parts between the predetermined patterns of the electrode layer 12a are formed with patterns of a type complementary with the electrode layer 12a constituted by a blank pattern layer 24 by the printing method again. In the state with no blank pattern layer 24 formed, if stacking a large number of green sheets and electrode layers, step differences will occur between the parts with no electrode layers and parts with electrode layers. Due to this, sheet delamination, stack deformation, etc. become problems. For this reason, recently, as shown in Documents 1 to 4 (Japanese Patent Publication (A) No. 56-94719, Japanese Patent Publication (A) No. 3-74820, Japanese Patent Publication (A) No. 9-106925, and Japanese Patent Publication (A) No. 2001-237140), to deal with the increase in the number of layers and the reduction in the layer thicknesses, the method of forming a pattern layer comprised of a dielectric paste similar to the green sheet at the blank pattern parts where no electrode layer is formed has been proposed.
However, in the conventional printing and drying method, when printing and drying an electrode layer 12a on the green sheet or release layer at the surface of the carrier sheet 20, the heat at the time of drying sometimes causes the polyethylene terephthalate forming the carrier sheet 20 to end up stretching along the long direction. This is probably because the carrier sheet 20 is a drawn film. The heat at the time of drying probably ends up causing shrinking along the long direction.
For this reason, in the next step, if forming the blank pattern layer 24 by printing by the design dimensions, as shown in FIG. 10, it was found that the blank pattern layer 24 was liable to be printed deviated in position. In particular, due to the patterns of the electrode layer 12a being made finer and thinner, the positional deviation at the time of printing causes sheet delamination, stack deformation, and other problems after the subsequent stacking step.
Note that Document 5 (Japanese Patent Publication (A) No. 2004-144433) discloses a drying method measuring the change in dynamic pressure of the flow of air at the inlet of the drying oven and preventing uneven drying etc. However, with the method shown in this Document 5, it was not possible to prevent deformation of the support sheet due to the heat inside the drying chamber and was not possible to prevent positional deviation or dimensional deviation at the time of printing.